Red
by Sagakure
Summary: The color red was the main thing he would forever remember about that night. Red, from the very moment he woke up and looked around himself at the death clinging to the blood splattered everywhere... Zero centered fic. One-shot, might become a series.


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**_Title: Red_**

_**Disclaimer:** I don't own Vampire Knight, this is a fanfic written for fun and for love of the series. I'm not making any money with it.  
__**Warning: **Angst._

_**Summary:** The color red was the main thing he would forever remember about that night. Red, from the very moment he woke up and looked around himself at the death clinging to the blood splattered everywhere... Zero centered fic. One-shot, might become a series. _

_I was going to upload this as part of my short story collection, "Scattered leaves", but I might write a sequel for it, so I'm posting it as a separate one-shot. I'm not sure yet if it will have a sequel, so for now it's just a 'maybe'. has rabid plot bunnies XD_

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The color red was the main thing he would forever remember about that night.

Red, not from the blood – in the dim room, it had looked a brownish tone, dark crimson or almost black.

Red from the unbearable burning of his infinite shame.

Red, from the very moment he woke up, and looked around himself, at the death clinging to the blood splattered everywhere.

No bodies in sight, of course, as they had already been removed. Men were walking around the house, examining the area and salvaging things, preparing to close the scene before handing it over to the normal authorities. The hunters would probably burn the place down before calling the police.

He had been unconscious, curled up in a cold pool of his own blood, right where he had passed out, where _she_, the beast, had left him.

It would have been more logical to leave the bodies of the dead for later, and care first for the sole survivor. But when the boy painfully raised his head, his eyes made contact with his master's single eye, and he saw it. The reason why he was still laying in the freezing ground, even as the men sent by the Hunter's Society busied themselves, clearing the place of the massacre.

A shiver of absolute horror ran through Zero's body.

_He knew! He knew it, he had seen the wounds on his neck, or had known one way or another, and he wouldn't touch him._

Toga Yagari was a brave man. His mission record was infallible, and in addition he was skilled enough in the hunter arts to pass that knowledge on to the disciples that he visited between missions, traveling from hunter family to hunter family.

The hunt was Yagari's life, not out of cruelty, but because of a sense of duty and vocation that he had long carried within himself. But he wasn't ready for this. The utter mortification that the scene awakened in him was indescribable.

Yagari's lifestyle made it impossible for him to settle down and have children, but he had often found himself thinking that if he had a son, he wished the boy would be like Zero.

Zero had been his favorite pupil, the one who showed most potential.

And now, the boy had that future as well as his whole family and his human life all torn from him in a single night.

Yagari glanced down at the boy for a fraction of a second before looking away quickly.

And then, Zero knew it. That his master would never lay eyes on him again after that night. That at the man's eyes he was _"one of them"_ now, lost forever.

The boy had no way to know that when Yagari looked away, it was because he feared his soul would break if he lingered on the boy's wounded form. He had lived in the field of battle his whole life, and he simply couldn't allow himself to spill his tears in front of Zero now. He couldn't break his hunter composure, hardened by years of bloodshed. If he let his guard down now, he wasn't sure it would reform completely.

But to Zero, the only reason he could find for his master's coldness was the complete disgust the boy currently felt towards himself. A disgust that the other men from the Hunter's Society shared and had no qualms about showing openly. They too, left Zero on the ground and didn't bother approaching him, although in their case it was truly out of revulsion. At their eyes, his human existence had been completely erased the moment he got bitten, gone from their minds as surely as if it had never existed. Hunter born or not, he was now_ one of the beasts_, or would be soon enough when he fully turned, and as such it surprised them that the boy would be left alive in the first place. They couldn't go against Yagari's decision since he outranked them, but they didn't understand why the man had made the phone call to his old friend, asking him to come pick up the boy._ Such filth should just be terminated or locked away with the other prisoners to be _tamed _back at the headquarters._

Zero saw it all, their thoughts filled with hatred clearly apparent in their eyes and in the way they shot him revulsed glares in between whispering to each other out of Yagari's earshot just in case. Zero knew. At the eyes of everybody he had ever known, at the eyes of everything that had been "home" for him until now, he had died that night. He didn't exist anymore, replaced by the animal he would inevitably become as soon as the pureblood's saliva in his bloodstream finished to irrevocably alter his DNA. He wanted to cry, but he was so far gone that the tears didn't even come out. All he could do was stare at the wall with unseeing eyes, burning from the lack of blinking, wishing he was dead rather than turning into a monster, wishing the ground would just swallow him and let him disappear at last, wishing that if he stayed really quiet and curled up to look smaller than he was, the others wouldn't notice him anymore and would just let him die there rather than continue to look at him that way and call him what they were calling him in their whispers now.

He was the child prodigy, everybody used to say. The hunter that everybody had expected to become one of the very best of their generation. He had even proved his skill by spotting her before anyone else had, when she came.

And yet, he couldn't do anything at all to stop her. He couldn't even fight her, as she held him in that mortal embrace, the kiss of death bestowed upon his childish neck, tearing him apart from the life he would have had as a human and a hunter, throwing him into the despair of the new life he was now bound to have, as an accursed beast, a vampire.

Turned unwillingly, a violation not any different from rape. _Didn't the bloodsuckers say that drinking from one's neck was almost the same as sexual intercourse, for them?_

Yagari had no idea, but that night, they had finished to break what Shizuka had already almost completely shattered in Zero.

Shizuka tore away from Zero everything he had, but it was Yagari who, unknowingly and out of no ill intent, shot Zero the first glance that a human gives a vampire. And that left a damage that could never quite be repaired. Other people's opinions would have been painful enough in Zero's wounded state, but it wouldn't have mattered as much; but Yagari's opinion, Yagari's horrified gaze on Zero… that mattered for the boy.

It was the last drop needed for the dam to overflow.

If it was possible to hear your own soul breaking, Zero could swear he heard it that night.

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Sagakure, August 18th 2008.

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Zero is living walking angst.

I'm not sure yet if this will have a sequel, but I have plot bunnies with Zero at Cross Academy, with Kaname and little Yuuki.


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